> In strong-bundle occupations… AI improves performance inside the job, but does not remove the human from the bundle," the authors argue.
At least in software engineering, AI can't replace the accountability that only humans can provide, but it multiplies the surface area that a human is accountable for, driving up the work demands on worker in one dimension while it lowers the demand for actual coding. On balance, it's more work down with far fewer people.
> It also squares with what we're seeing so far. AI is reshaping jobs, not wiping them out. Tasks move around, productivity may go up, yet employment and hours haven't shifted much – at least yet. In many cases, the bundle is still holding.
AI will supercharge the decades-old trend of productivity growth dramatically outpacing both employment and compensation, as the returns go primarily to the owners of capital.
The result: a lack of job growth while productivity still rises, and also stagnant wages as workers lose the labor market leverage.
I don't understand how this isn't just an argument for confiscation by the masses.
My employer pays for the tokens, does the brown bags to disseminate learnings, encourages 20% time and hackathons. Of course they don't also hand me a bag of cash for no reason.
Why would anyone deploy capital not seeking a return?
Actually where I live in the EU plumbers make more than most software devs because there's so few of them. It takes months for a scheduled job and emergency work is obviously top dollar.
> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you.
A free market that is "properly priced" is a not a real state of existence.
Resource and information asymmetry, and the exploitation by the those with resource and information privilege of those without it has been present from the very beginning. A free market is just a tool (among many) to achieve a goal for a society.
For some, that goal is explicitly the concentration of wealth and welfare in very few hands. This is oligarchy.
For others, it's the advantaging the welfare and dignity of their "tribe" at the cost of welfare and dignity to perceived outsiders.
And for yet others, it is the advancement of universal welfare and dignity.
Neither a free market nor socialism gets you any of these. What gets you there are the shared narratives that utilize tools like free markets, regulation, and redistribution.
I ran BeOS on both the dual PowerPC desktop and later on an x86 laptop. Thanks to its posix-ish environment, I was able to do all my upper division CS projects on it.
Others who had windows or macs had to "telnet" into a remote Unix workstation in an engineering lab to do the same.
> Anyone who has been doing this professionally will tell you that the "last step" is what takes the majority of time and effort.
That's true, but even the "last step" is being accelerated. The 10% that takes 90% of the time has itself been cut in half.
An example is turning debug logs and bug reports into bugfixes, and performance stats into infrastructure migrations.
The time required to analyze, implement, and deploy those has been reduced by a large amount.
It still needs to be coupled with software engineering skills - to decide between multiple solutions generated by an LLM, but the acceleration is significant.
> So, how many years until we'll see results, then?
-0.75 years.
Software development output (features, bugs, products) - especially at smaller companies like startups - has already accelerated significantly, while software development hiring has stayed flat or declined. So there has been a dramatic increase in human-efficiency. To me, that seems like a result, although it's cold comfort as a software engineer.
You probably won't see this reflected as a multiplication of new apps because the app consumer's attention is already completely tapped. There's very little attention surface area left to capture.
> You don't think capitalists are able to generate profit off of these LLMs currently?
Not sure where you are reading that. I said that they are able to be far more human-efficient because of LLMs, implying they are able to reduce costs relative to outputs/revenue, which means higher profits.
> Carmakers releasing test cars to markets and then destroying them was a common practice - GM did the same with their hydrogen cars, the famous turbine engine cars, and even large scale prototypes like the Aerovette. In many cases they were only able to circumvent safety/testing regulation because these were not registerable cars.
The EV1 wasn't just a "test car". It was a production vehicle which was built (as you said) to comply with the California ZEV mandate, which GM also spent millions lobbying against, and eventually defeating, while they were contracting with an outside engineering firm to design the EV1.
TTBOMK, GM didn't spend millions lobbying against turbine engine and hydrogen fuel cell tech.
> It was a production vehicle which was built (as you said) to comply with the California ZEV mandate.
It was never a true production car - none of the cars GM leased were registerable because they did not have a finalized production design submitted to safety or (ironically) EPA standards.
Technically GM did lobby against hydrogen fuel cell tech at the same time because the ZEV mandate specifically also included hydrogen as a potential solution. But no one is accusing GM of also killing the hydrogen car just because it made it less far along the development process.
I know it's the real controversial opinion - but nobody was wrong. The experience of CARB more or less proved that a successful EV was not immediately available. But mass hybridization probably resulted in more measurable emissions savings than the original 10% ZEV goal ever would have.
> Society is self-organizing like that, and this stuff is all iterated prisoner's dilemma in the end..
"Iterating the prisoners dilemma" at all levels of interface with government, moral qualms about autocracy/authoritarianism aside, is a very inefficient way to run a society, because government is an inherent and natural monopoly.
Even in private commerce, it only works where there are choices and not monopolies.
"Zero trust" is optimal for machine communication networks, not human organizations.
I never said it was efficient. There's clearly a lot of potential value wasted compared to more trustable institutions. Your point about monopoly is off the mark, though – in every high-trust society it's the government that people need to trust, because it's the ultimate enforcer of trust in any other institutions.
> Your point about monopoly is off the mark, though – in every high-trust society it's the government that people need to trust, because it's the ultimate enforcer of trust in any other institutions.
I'm not sure where the disagreement is. I agree that people need to trust government in a high trust society. Government is also the ultimate inherent monopoly.
> Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated,
Absorbing information doesn't make you "educated". Learning how to employ knowledge with accountability and trust with beings in the real world is what's important, and a machine can't teach you how to do that.
> or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
Why is it "co-opting" if it involves a mutually consenting exchange?
Neither does traditional human interacting education - those are things you learn in your first jobs in the real world, regardless of how you were educated.
The reason they didn't release Chrome for arm64 Linux almost certainly wasn't about technical feasibility, but rather about it being worth the support costs.
The Android arm64 Chrome build is clearly worth it to them, as is the Chrome build for ARM Chromebooks.
Before this point they probably didn't think that arm64 Linux was a worthwhile target to support (especially since Chromium was available on arm64 Linux anyways).
I'm not sure what has changed in the desktop/laptop ARM Linux market that changed their minds - or maybe they want to put their shoulder behind that market.
> If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product and my efficiency. Working less as a reaction to losing market share seems completely counterproductive to me.
That may work if you are a sole proprietor or small business person, but that's not how shareholder owned corporations work.
A sole proprietor is willing to work more if business drops (effectively lowering their compensation rate) because they are the beneficiary of any future gains that may (or may not) result from their short term sacrifice. If they want their employees to do the same they have to give them the same deal.
A large corporation can't easily make its employees work much longer for the same pay (except in the very short term), nor can it easily get shareholders to be OK with increasing spending on labor. This usually ends with massive layoffs when it can't sustain itself anymore.
That's one reason that smaller companies can be more nimble.
At least in software engineering, AI can't replace the accountability that only humans can provide, but it multiplies the surface area that a human is accountable for, driving up the work demands on worker in one dimension while it lowers the demand for actual coding. On balance, it's more work down with far fewer people.
> It also squares with what we're seeing so far. AI is reshaping jobs, not wiping them out. Tasks move around, productivity may go up, yet employment and hours haven't shifted much – at least yet. In many cases, the bundle is still holding.
AI will supercharge the decades-old trend of productivity growth dramatically outpacing both employment and compensation, as the returns go primarily to the owners of capital.
The result: a lack of job growth while productivity still rises, and also stagnant wages as workers lose the labor market leverage.
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